


Smoke on the Water

by strangesongs (elusivefade)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drabble, Experimental Style, Firestiel, Freeform, Gen, M/M, Smokestiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 01:56:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8037664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elusivefade/pseuds/strangesongs
Summary: Castiel is smoke in the wind; smoke plays an important part in Dean's life.





	Smoke on the Water

**Author's Note:**

> \---
> 
> This drabble was written in like 2012. It isn't perfect and make about as much sense as a squirrel in a sauna. I'm not in the SPN fandom anymore, but I was really proud of this when I wrote it. I think it was a season seven AU? Maybe?
> 
> It was at the height of the Object!stiel phase. Castiel as an object rather than a person. Or becoming one after death, or before his original intro.

Rummaging through another junk drawer in an abandoned house on a supposed werewolf case with the average missing “the body was missing the heart” bit, (as it turned out the “werewolf” was actually a ghost, but Dean did not know this at the time), Dean found a single match in a matchbox. Red and bulbous at the top, unused, it lay in an empty box.  

This bothered Dean. He didn’t know why or what caused him to need to light the match when he had his lighter with him. 

It took a few tries to get the damn thing to light up, scratching it against the matchbox’s side. Flaring up suddenly and stabilizing into a pretty little flame, the match’s burning top blackened as the smoke rose. Dean exhaled and inhaled making the match’s light quake as molecules hit the visible use of energy. The matchstick curled as the fire consumed its wood. 

Dean blew the light out before it burnt him. He crushed the remnants of the match underneath his boot.

For the next few days, he couldn’t get the taste of smoke out of his mouth. Every breath he took was flavored with the smell of burning matches.

 

The first time Castiel met Dean Winchester, the angel of Thursdays, blew up half of a dozen light bulbs. The vapor they released refused to leave the barn as Castiel announced who he was, what he did for Dean, and, of course, why he knocked Bobby out.

Being a reasonable person, Dean shot and stabbed that bastard before he got a word in, but by the time Castiel was finished his spiel, Dean had taken in enough smoke-filled air to feel the need to clear his throat.

 

The afterimage of the light bulbs bursting and smoke loftily floating, dispersing itself became a constant before Dean woke up from every nightmare.  

 

Dean was raking leaves at Lisa’s when he got a whiff of the smoke coming from a neighbor’s wood burning fireplace. It smelled heavenly. 

Dean had always wanted a wood burning fireplace ever since Dad had taken him and Sammy to a cabin when they were hunting a ghost in the northern part of Montana.

It had been in winter. Eleven year old Dean and seven year old Sam were left in the cabin when it started snowing very hard. Dean rushed out to chop wood before it got too bad, ordering Sammy to stay put. Dean didn’t have a warm winter coat on because he had shoved it at Sammy making sure he was warm enough. Dean dug the axe out of the snow with his bare hands and then spent a solid forty minutes chopping down a fallen tree into firewood. By the time Dean got back, his fingers were covered in splinters and were nearly frozen. Sam forced Dean to sit down next to the fireplace and wrapped him in some of the blankets he had found when Dean was out.

Tossing wood into the fireplace, Sam light a match and the fire grew “not quickly enough” according to Sam. Dean leaned as close as he could to the flame and eventually began to thaw out. Throughout the night, Dean feed the fire more logs and made sure it was still going so they wouldn’t freeze before Dad had got back.

Stretching his shoulders as he finished his chore, Dean asked Ben if any of the neighbors had installed a wood burning fireplace and Ben said no.

Dean went out back and looked up to see if there were any chimneys nearby. There weren’t any and the smell of smoke was gone. “I’m going senile”, thought Dean as he rubbed his shoulder.

 

After they found Sam and left that tarnished, cursed warehouse, Dean rummaged through his coat pocket as he drove Sam and Bobby out to the hospital. 

A burnt match was in there. He could not remember putting it there and, for fuck’s sake, he didn’t really care with all the shit that had just gone down. The end of the world was here again for the fiftieth time, so Dean didn’t really give a fucking shit about a single match.

The match crumbled and split into ash as Dean put a miniscule amount of pressure on it. 

Rubbing the charcoal into his palm, Dean thought, this is why I like lighters better. 

Matches have such short life spans.

 


End file.
